


Sobremesa

by ChancellorGriffin



Category: La casa de papel | Money Heist (TV)
Genre: Cooking, Domestic Bliss, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Food Porn, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Heist Camp, Kitchen Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-08-19 21:28:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20216557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: Family dinners at the monastery bring Raquel and Sergio even closer.





	1. Barra Gallega (Mónica)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“‘It's like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes.’_
> 
> _‘That's how I feel about eating,’ Sirine interjects, and some of them laugh._
> 
> _Aziz lifts his chin and lowers his eyes silkily. ‘Please tell us more.’_
> 
> _‘Well, I mean . . .’ She fumbles for words and tears apart a slice of bread, trying to think what she means. ‘Something like . . . tasting a piece of bread that someone bought is like looking at that person, but tasting a piece of bread that they baked is like looking out of their eyes.’_
> 
> _‘Fabulous metaphor,’ Aziz says._
> 
> _Nathan lifts his head. ‘That's giving other people power over you.’_
> 
> _‘No more than usual,’ Aziz says. ‘Somebody's always going to have the power, and somebody's always got to bake the bread.’"_
> 
> ― Diana Abu-Jaber, _Crescent_

Most all of them can cook, to varying degrees (well, all right, Tokyo can’t make anything but sangria, but she always helps with the dishes and it’s very good sangria, so nobody minds too much) . . . but only Mónica can bake.

The Professor _ could, _ certainly, if he wanted to - what, after all, is a bread recipe but chemistry, mathematics and strategy? - but it makes him impatient. Crafting the perfect cheese plate, the most dazzlingly innovative _ pintxos, _ the most colorful salad, these are _ active; _ the hands never stop moving, the process begins and then continues until it is complete. They require creativity, precision, imagination. The harmony of salty cheese against sweet fig, the contrast of a bright green _ pimiento de Padrón _against the stark white of a china bowl. Planning, then execution, then enjoyment of the final product. This kind of cooking soothes his soul.

Baking bread, on the other hand, requires waiting, and hope, and the serene yielding of control to forces beyond your power, and impatience can ruin it altogether. Lift the dishcloth covering the bowl of rising dough too many times, open the oven door too early or too late, and perfection will be impossible to achieve. 

The Professor is self-aware enough to know his own strengths, and likewise his own weaknesses. The joys of baking are not for him.

Besides, he has never lived anywhere in all his life which lacked a neighborhood bakery. Their very first week at the safe house in Toledo, Berlin - who took food as seriously as he took women and diamonds - discovered a small yellow-and-white storefront in the nearest village whose loaves, stacked in the little front window like sculptures, infused the narrow little street with buttery, yeasty scents so decadent they made the mouth water. One taste of the still-warm sweet roll his brother placed in his hand, the heady aromas of orange and cinnamon rising up from its pillowy white center to beckon him closer, and it was immediately clear there was no point in attempting to compete. Better, always, to bow before the superior craftsman. The Professor knows genius when he meets it.

And so, in Toledo, they all took turns making the early-morning supply runs for equipment and groceries, sporting a range of disguises to avoid suspicion or notice, and always their last stop on the way home was to that little yellow-and-white bakery to bring home the long, thin, crisp loaves which they would pass around the table and tear into rough chunks with their hands, to sop up the sweet juices of a fresh tomato or to lovingly cradle a paper-thin slice of _ jamón ibérico. _

And here they are now at the monastery - in a country where the master baker's handiwork is revered no less than in Spain, where everyone understands that all it needs is a drizzle of sharp green olive oil and a pinch of sea salt to ascend to its most perfect form - and the Professor expects that here too, fresh bread will be an indulgence enjoyed on those days where someone has gone into town to do the shopping.

But he is wrong.

Because in Italy, they have Mónica.

* * * * *

In Madrid, her suppers were listless. Cooking for one, on a secretary’s budget, depressed her a little, and her meals were competent but uninspired. From time to time, if his wife was away, Arturo would indulge himself with his mistress in the evenings, allowing them both a little more time than their usual stolen moments in his office with the door locked. Sometimes he would take her out to dinner, but this was rare; the possibility of being caught terrified more than it excited him. More often, he attempted to cook for her, elaborately and performatively, platter after platter of complex French dishes for which he had the ambition but not the focus or technical skill. These were never a success, though she was always obligated to smile and applaud as if they were; when Arturo was with his family, his wife did all the cooking, so preparing grandiose meals for Mónica was intended to impress her.

(Still, somehow, even at his house, she always ended up doing the dishes.)

Left to her own devices, with no undercooked roast chicken or mealy potatoes from Arturo to dutifully exclaim over, Mónica’s tastes were simple. She could take a single pot of white beans - left to soak overnight, then dumped into her American-style slow cooker the next morning before work along with some herbs and broth, maybe a little sliced chorizo - and stretch it out for a whole week, if she was careful, and it would be perfectly satisfactory, even if it was not anything special.

This was not the realm in which her magic dwelt.

Once upon a time, in a tiny Spanish mountain village, Mónica’s grandparents opened a bakery, and one day their teenage daughter fell in love with the delivery boy from the flour mill two towns over, like something from a children’s story. The bakery was the home in which Mónica was raised, even more so than her parents’ actual house, and she loved it dearly, even though she always knew one day she would grow up and move away and leave it behind her. 

To their credit, no one in the family had begrudged it when she went off to Madrid to go to school and get her certificate, and all of them were proud when she got her fancy city job. But they were gone now, and so was the bakery - sold to a chain of grocery stores after her grandparents died. A smaller loss, obviously, but a real one all the same.

Still, the elder Gaztambides had not left this world before teaching Mónica everything they knew.

At home in Madrid, she baked only for herself, an inexpensive indulgence of flour and water and salt which she could tell herself was economically efficient (the cost of decent bought bread these days!) But it had nothing to do with money, really. It was an escape. Bathed in the warm yellow light of a Saturday morning which poured in through her apartment window, the chipped blue mixing bowl and wooden spoon and tin of flour were a road traveled backwards which led her back home to the kitchen where her grandfather had first lifted her little bare feet onto a wooden chair so she could stand beside him and help shape rings of dough.

She did not bake for Arturo, because he would ask where she learned it, but he would not really care; it would simply be a way for him to fill one of the many tedious silences which occur when two people who have, actually, very little to say to one another, take a brief interlude between rounds of fucking in which etiquette dictates they make some attempt at conversation. 

Mónica knows exactly how the conversation would have gone: she would demur, reluctant to share something so intimate, and the act of denying him anything would only spur him onward, make him more insistent, until he had extracted from her the entire story. So she would relent, and tell him all about it - the decadent aroma of yeast and the sound of her grandfather humming old folk songs while he pulled trays out of the oven and the wonder of watching dough rise, what a simple everyday miracle it had always seemed to her - and Arturo would laugh heartily at the whole thing. “Cute,” he would say. “You should bake bread for me sometime. Maybe in a little white French apron. And nothing else.” At which point, the image he had planted in his own mind would distract him, making his cock begin to stiffen again, and he would roll back on top of her and shut her up with a kiss, and the deeply personal thing she’d been struggling to put into words for him would be forgotten, because it had never really mattered.

So she did not bake for him.

But for Denver - and later, for Cincinnati - she takes it back up again with giddy abandon, and every loaf shaped by her hands is so delicious that her husband begins to think that maybe she is magic. Everywhere they travel, all across the world, she finds new things to try. She bakes in big outdoor clay ovens in the public squares of Central American villages, where the white-haired _abuelas_ teach her how to make a perfect_ bocado de dama_. She bakes in rented villas across Europe, where gourmand owners have left expensive French copper cookware and cabinets full of imported salts that the old Mónica could never have afforded in that tiny Madrid apartment. She bakes in the tiny communal kitchens of rustic hostels from Costa Rica to the Philippines, where the stoves barely work and the lack of counter space means there is always a bowl of dough rising on top of the television or the bedroom dresser. Watching Cincinnati toddle around the kitchen with flour in his hair, smacking her husband on the ass with a wooden spoon for attempting to steal a piping hot _pan dulce_ before they’re ready to be served . . . these are a shortcut back to that road she could never share with Arturo, to that place where baking bread is the way you tell someone you love them. 

And if she could never bring herself to bake for Arturo, perhaps it is because even then, even before she knew, she knew.

The monastery’s stone oven is a thing of beauty, ancestral and vast and blackened with history. A thousand years of loaves were prepared in silent devotion here, gifts from each baker to his brothers and to God. Mónica has not been to church since her Confirmation, except for weddings and funerals, but she feels like the monks who left their marks here over the centuries would understand her. They would look at a man like her grandfather - a man she could never have introduced to Arturo, the social climber, the urban snob, with his disdain for blue-collar workers - and see his flour-streaked apron and calloused hands, and they would recognize in him a kindred spirit. The Cistercians, like the Gaztambides, know what bread means - that it is the foundation, the place where the meal begins, the convergence point where the simple alchemy of flour and water and heat is revealed in its purest form. They know that Jesus could have shared with his disciples an apple, or a fish, but he chose bread instead, and this was deliberate, a reminder that this humble fare has been sacred and communal from the first moment humans invented cooking over fire.

Arturo liked the reserved, careful Mónica, hair tamed into propriety for the workplace, slim body zipped tightly into chic wool dresses, a docile creature who came alive only for him. He would not recognize this Mónica - wild blonde curls held back by colorful scarves, streaks of flour on her jeans, joy glowing in her bright eyes as she hands a soft roll warm from the oven to Cincinnati and watches him munch happily while he hops across the tile floor, this Mónica who is kneading dough with strong, deft hands, thinking thoughts about Jesus and her grandfather and the meaning of bread which Arturo could never possibly understand.

But the Professor would.

She has never said any of this out loud to him, but she knows it anyway.

* * * * *

Mónica discovers that Lisbon, too, has the gift of baking, almost by accident.

Cincinnati is restless all night with a fever, and his miserable wails do not let up until nearly dawn. Denver and Mónica pace up and down the length of the entire house, rocking him and crooning to him while they wait for the medicine to take effect (the Professor, nervous about medical emergencies, keeps an impeccably-stocked cabinet for every eventuality), but by the time the sun begins to rise and Cincinnati finally wears himself out and closes his eyes, neither parent has slept.

Lisbon, by nature one of the house’s earliest risers, descends the staircase a little after six in search of coffee, only to find Denver collapsed on the sofa with his son on his chest as a bleary-eyed Mónica shuffles wearily toward the kitchen.

“Absolutely not,” she tells the other woman firmly. “Back upstairs to bed. All three of you.”

“I left the dough to rise overnight,” Mónica begins, but Lisbon cuts her off.

“I’ll take care of breakfast,” she says. “The Professor can move this morning’s class back an hour or two. You and Denver need to get some sleep.”

“It has to be kneaded, then rise another hour and shaped into rings before -”

“I’ll take care of it,” Lisbon promises, shooing her back into the living room to collect her drowsy husband and son, then shoving all three of them back towards the stairs. “I won’t let you down.”

If it was anyone else in the house, Mónica would protest that she is fine, that she is perfectly capable of managing her family and her work and her share of the group’s domestic labor without assistance from anyone else. An offer of help from one of the others might leave her feeling defensive, vulnerable, anxious to prove herself.

But from another mom, she takes it for exactly what it is: solidarity and compassion.

_ So what, if she’s a shitty baker, if for one morning there’s no fresh bread, _ she thinks, as she follows Denver up the stairs, yawning. _ They’ll all live. _

Then she collapses onto the mattress, Denver’s arms around her waist and Cincinnati’s around her neck, and that’s the last she thinks about Lisbon for the next four hours.

* * * * *

Sergio wakes to find Raquel’s side of the bed empty, and the rest of the house still silent. Hardly a surprise, that everyone is sleeping late this morning; taking Cincinnati downstairs muffled, but did not entirely dim, his unhappy cries, and the others had not slept that much better than the parents did. It will be another hour, if not two, he predicts, before anyone but Raquel is awake, so he feels reasonably safe from an awkward hallway run-in with Tokyo, who will almost definitely laugh at his striped pajamas. He smells bread baking, which means Mónica is in the kitchen, but Mónica will not tease him, or at least she will wait politely until he pours himself a cup of coffee and returns upstairs, preferably taking Raquel back with him.

But when he arrives, Raquel is alone.

The kitchen is warm, thick with the heady aromas of yeast and flour and salt, and Raquel is bending over to peer inside the huge stone oven, her back to him as he enters the room. He swallows, hard, at the sight of her shapely calves and powerful thighs, the firm, round swell of her ass just barely visible beneath the hem of her white cotton slip. She rises back up, revealing the elegant planes of her bare shoulders, the delicate ridges of her spine, and he inhales the primal, ancient scents of woman and bread tangled together, pulling him towards her.

“Good morning,” she murmurs happily as he presses his mouth against the hollow at the back of her neck, as his hands clutch hungrily at the cotton fabric over her hips. “Sorry I disappeared on you. I only came down for coffee, but Mónica needed rest more than she needed to make breakfast, so I sent her back upstairs. Cincinnati seems to have finally fallen asleep, hopefully his parents have too.”

“Everyone is asleep,” he whispers hoarsely into her skin, feeling the steam from the oven brush over his skin with an almost palpable weight, and it’s  _ doing  _ something to him, he doesn’t know what, but it’s something to do with heat and salt and gratitude and the scent of bread which was shaped by Raquel’s hands and which will contain molecules of her which will pass from the bread into his body and somehow make him even more irrevocably hers, and suddenly he has to have her, here, now, pressed up against the ancient stone wall beside the roaring oven, warmth bathing their skin.

Raquel turns to him, raising an eyebrow, smiling with mischief, feeling the way his hands and breath are growing more frantic against her body. “Here?” she asks, a little dubiously. “Where we cook our food? I would have thought you would be too . . . fastidious for that.”

“There are cleaning supplies under the sink,” he responds as he backs her up against the wall, voice muffled by the skin of her shoulder as he nuzzles in deeper and deeper, making her sigh. “I’ll be very thorough. No one will know.”

“What’s gotten into you?” she laughs, a little breathlessly, closing her eyes and arching her back as his hands skim up the white cotton and find her breasts, stirring her nipples into tight little peaks. 

“No idea. Can a person get high off bread fumes?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And Mónica didn’t put some kind of aphrodisiac in this?”

“If she did, she didn’t tell me, but I suspect it’s perfectly ordinary bread.”

“Then it must just be that I want you very, very badly,” he murmurs, tracing the outline of her bottom lip with his thumb before seizing her mouth for a ravenous kiss, which she meets with abandon, moaning into him and parting her thighs reflexively to pull his body closer to hers. His cock stirs, awakened by her proximity.

“If Palermo walks in on us fucking in the kitchen . . .”

“Everyone’s asleep,” he whispers, tugging the white cotton of her nightdress up over her hips, baring her cunt to the aromatic heat of the kitchen. “But even if they weren’t, I wouldn’t care.”

“Maybe she  _ did _ put something in the bread,” Raquel teases him, unbuttoning his pajama top so she can rake her fingertips gently up and down his chest, making him shudder. “I’ll have to make sure I keep the recipe for later. I like you like this.”

“In all my life,” he tells her, so overcome that he closes his eyes, unable to look at her, “I have never wanted anyone like this.”

“You never allowed yourself to,” she counters him gently. “You are allowed to want things now, Sergio. You aren’t alone anymore.” She kisses his mouth, soft and sweet and hungry. Sergio can taste the bread dough in her mouth, where she tasted it before shaping it into loaves for the oven. “Tell me what you want, love,” she murmurs. “I like to hear you say it.”

“I want you to take me inside you.” He exhales the words into the skin of her throat, sending shivers rolling down her spine. “Right here. Just like this.”

“Yes,” she breathes, reaching out for the waistband of his pajamas and tugging it down gently to lift his cock free. “Yes. Tell me more. Tell me what you want.”

The heat has permeated his whole body now, seeped down to his bones, drawing tiny beads of sweat out of his skin as the great stone oven roars just a few feet away.

“Scent is made up of matter,” he whispers. “Your hands touching the dough. Your breath, when you come. I want to taste you inside the bread.”

Raquel doesn’t say anything to this, just lifts one thigh to wrap around his waist, fists his open pajama top in both hands to tug him closer, and opens herself all the way up, and then in one long, smooth thrust, he’s home inside her.

“Raquel,” he pants urgently into her skin, tasting yeast and flour on his tongue as it traces the tendons of her throat, and he can feel her murmuring his name in response, her mouth buried in the thick, soft curls of his hair.

The ancient monastery walls soak up everything - the scents of their bodies, the sounds of their cries - and distantly, a part of Sergio’s still-conscious mind is awestruck and humbled by this, that his love for Raquel has melted into the thousand-year history of these stones, so that no matter what, now it will outlive them. 

They come together, bodies damp with sweat, breath coming in deep gasping cries, hands roaming everywhere, heat from the stone oven swirling around their shuddering bodies like a dry desert wind, fierce and warm and sweet and full of a hundred emotions they cannot name.

* * * * *

“I don’t know what you did to this bread,” Palermo will say to Mónica at lunch, as he holds up the thick slice in his hand which he has lavished with farm-fresh butter and flakes of white salt, “but it’s the best fucking bread I’ve ever tasted.”

Sergio and Raquel - who were just thinking the same thing - stare down at their plates, unable to meet each other’s gaze, each hiding a soft, secret smile.

* * * * *

That night, when Sergio kisses his way up the inside of Raquel’s thigh to rest his forehead on the soft mound of her pelvic bone and breathe in her scent, he can still smell the aroma of fresh-baked bread.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have absolutely no memory of whether or not we learn anything over the course of the show about Mónica's family, so it's entirely possible that my made-up headcanons for her are - or will turn out to be - way off-base; but once I got the picture in my head of her as a blue-collar rural kid who went off to the big city to make something of herself, and had to carefully hide that part of herself away from Arturo who would never appreciate it, it felt so right that I couldn't let it go.


	2. Pa amb tomàquet (Denver y Cincinnati)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we've all had to become disappears, when we’re confronted with something as simple as a plate of food.”_  
  
― Anthony Bourdain, _Kitchen Confidential_

The first thing Denver ever steals is a tomato.

He is five years old, toddling along on his little legs after his father, who takes him on a stroll down to the village to pick up an old clock he brought to the watchmaker to get fixed. On the way home, they pass the open-air _ mercado _ near the town square, and stop to pick up an eggplant for dinner. Moscow has an ongoing, amicable feud with the white-haired old lady who sells fruits and vegetables, and the two of them enjoy arguing heatedly over prices. _ Las uvas, _ these are smaller than they were last week, she cannot expect him to pay the same for a bunch which is half the size! _ Mierda, _ does he think she is _made_ of money, grapes cost what they cost to grow, why should he wish to rob an old woman blind! And so on, and so forth, until Moscow haggles her down to the price he was going to pay anyway, which she was going to accept anyway, and the transaction is completed, both of them entertained and energized by the good-natured shouting.

Little Ricardo wanders away from his father while the two adults are heatedly debating which head of garlic is the freshest, and is drawn to a small table in the corner with a dazzling heap of perfect, glossy red tomatoes piled in baskets, shining like fat round jewels. 

Ricardo likes tomatoes. Papa grows them in his little garden behind the house, along with carrots (which he does _ not _ like) and other green leafy things. Tomatoes are cheap and easy to grow in great quantities, Papa says, and can be cooked into sauces and poured into jars to last all year. Papa puts tomatoes in everything. Sometimes, when he is working in the garden, Ricardo sits outside in the grass to watch, or help him dig, and every once in awhile Papa will hand him a tomato, fresh off the vine, which he will bite into and then laugh as warm red juice explodes all over his face and his shirt.

To him, then, a tomato is not a thing you pay for. It is like blue skies and air and sunshine, it is a thing you just reach out and take.

Moscow and the fruit seller do not notice the theft until they hear the little boy burst into giggles, and turn to see him with scarlet juice trailing down his chin and onto his white t-shirt, chomping happily on a now-squished tomato carcass.

Moscow sighs wearily, and digs a few more coins out of his pocket, having now rather definitively lost his edge in the garlic negotiations. The fruit seller wins this round.

“Raising a little thief, are we?” she asks with a raised eyebrow, giving the little boy a look which is both scolding and amused, and this is the first time little Ricardo Ramos hears the word “thief.” 

(He does not know yet what it means. He thinks it has something to do with getting to eat as many tomatoes as you like.)

“Papa,” he says, scampering to keep up with his father’s longer strides as they make their way back home. “When I am big I want to be a thief.”

His father looks down at him with a curious expression on his face. 

“I hope not, _ mi querido hijo,” _ he says quietly. “I hope not.”

* * *

Dad does all the cooking at home. Denver never really learns. He can make a very good sandwich, he’s good at sandwiches, and if pressed he can boil some pasta and dump sauce on it, but learning to actually _make_ _ food - _like, out of nothing but_ ingredients - _is a skill he has no time for. He ribs his father, sometimes, that this is a job for a woman, maybe one of them needs to bring home a wife so Dad won’t have to spend so much time in the kitchen, and this always earns him a hard smack on the back of the head.

When Dad is arrested, there is no one to do the cooking.

The peppers in the little garden rot on the vine. The carrots shrivel and dry up. Denver doesn’t know what to do with any of it, and it’s easier to pretend it’s not there, easier not to think about his father in a dim, cramped cell choking down gristly brown prison stew with indeterminate chunks of stringy meat in it, when he’s supposed to be _here_, with his son, pouring hot garlic-lemon broth over bowls of mussels and ladling them up into a pair of dented tin bowls on the battered, ancient wooden table beneath the kitchen window. 

Denver lives on pizza and french fries while Moscow is in jail. It feels disloyal, somehow, to eat anything more elaborate than that. He has a computer, he could find a recipe and follow it, he isn't quite so stupid as everyone thinks he is, he could figure out how to cook mussels if he wanted to . . . but he knows he won’t. It would be like losing a piece of his absent father. Allowing himself to miss the food is safer than missing the person.

He makes one exception only - for the tomatoes.

Moscow has some kind of otherworldly gift with tomato plants; every year his little square vegetable bed delivers more than two men can eat, and bushels of them go into sauce. The pantry beneath the staircase is lined with jars, labeled in Moscow's square, blunt handwriting. (Denver does not eat these while his father is gone either, out of some irrational fear that something might someday happen to him and the tomato sauce might be all he has left, so it must be hoarded carefully.) Denver does nothing to the tomato plants, but they keep growing anyway, at least two or three huge, glossy red jewels ripen every day, faster than Denver can eat them all no matter how many sandwiches he makes.

This is where _ pa amb tomàquet _comes in - the one and only thing Denver can actually, truly cook.

Or, well, all right, there’s not much _ cooking _ to it, there’s no recipe to follow and nothing to measure and it’s ready in minutes and you don’t have to stand over the stove. But it _ feels _like making real food, it feels like something he could serve to Dad if Dad was here, and like everything else in the world it’s best with sun-ripened tomatoes just picked this morning, which are something Denver has in plenty.

This is how to make _ pa amb tomàquet, _the famous Catalan tomato bread served everywhere in Spain from breakfast tables to late-night bars.

First. Pull out a loaf of the best bread you can find. If you still have half a round, crusty, day-old loaf from the bakery down the street - the one where they know your father, and don’t believe the stories about him, and feel badly that your family got fucked over by the police, so they give you the leftovers that don’t sell because they know you’re always strapped for cash - that will work very well. Cut four thick slices and toast them until crisp.

Second. Go out back to your father’s garden and kneel down on the grass in front of the tomato plants. Run your fingers over the fat, glossy orbs dangling pendulously from green vines. Poke at them a little; you want a squishy one for this, just on the edge of overripe, you want the kind that would explode into sprays of red juice if a little boy bit into it at an open-air _ mercado. _ Pick the tomato you want. Apologize silently to the others. Some of them will go bad before you can use them, because you live alone, because your father is not here, but wasting half the tomato harvest he has spent so many years cultivating is a safer thing to feel guilty about than any of your other sins, so you can allow yourself this one small sadness which is more easily controlled than the rest.

Third. Take the tomato back into the kitchen. Your toast is not ready yet, so you have a little time. Find the head of garlic on the counter next to the stove, the one you bought at the _ mercado _ the other day from that same white-haired, bossy vegetable seller who first called you a thief when you were five years old - who is somehow, inexplicably, still alive, and still keeps a sharp eye on you in case you try to slip an apple or a bundle of asparagus into your coat without her seeing, even though she is so intimidating that you have never stolen from her again. Peel two cloves, and save the rest for tomorrow. Slice them in half, if they’re big, or pare a little sliver off the side, letting the sharp, bitter juice sting at your nostrils. Marvel at how only one clove of garlic can make a whole kitchen smell garlicky.

Fourth. Your toast is done. Pull it out of the oven or off the grill. Make sure it’s so crunchy it would snap if you broke it, almost but not quite too hard to eat. It will feel wrong. Trust the tomato. Rub the cut side of the garlic clove all over the surface of the bread, letting its rough texture work like a grater. The Ramos men like a lot of garlic; Denver uses at least half a clove on each slice, because that is how Dad used to do it, and Dad used to say that men who do not like a lot of garlic are not really men. You are a real man. You are strong. You can survive alone, if you have to. When Dad comes home you will want to show him that you did not break. Use all the garlic.

Fifth. Cut the tomato into quarters, if it’s large, or in half if it’s small. Rub the tomato all over the surface of the garlicky bread. Press firmly, so the soft, squishy red guts burst free from the peel, soaking into the crisp center of the bread and staining it red, infusing it with bright summer flavor. Let it remind you of all the times you bit into a warm tomato in your father’s garden and laughed as the juice ran down your chin. 

Sixth. A light drizzle of olive oil and a pinch of salt. Use the good salt, in the little glass jar Dad keeps next to the stove for garnishing, the one that comes in big white flakes, like snow. Do not disrespect your father’s tomatoes with the ordinary kitchen salt in the pantry. You could, of course, if you wanted, put cheese on top, or a slice of thin ham, or sprinkle it with sliced pickled peppers, but who would do such a thing? All they would do is create distance between you and your father’s tomato, which is the entire point of the recipe in the first place.

Seventh. The first bite. The tomato juice will have softened the overly-crisp center of the bread, creating an indescribably perfect consistency, crunchy around the edges but tender in the middle, shot through with the tang of raw garlic beneath the red sweetness. 

Sometimes four slices is enough.

Sometimes you miss your father so desperately that nothing can fill the ache inside you, so you go back outside for a second tomato and begin the process all over again.

* * *

Denver did not cook in Toledo for the same reason he did not cook at home - namely, nobody ever asked him to, everyone else is much better at it, and there are other things he would rather do with his time.

Dad bonded over the stove with Oslo and Helsinki, quite early on, and the three of them took the lion’s share of dinner duty, aided periodically by the Professor, Berlin or Nairobi. Denver helped wash dishes, sometimes, when somebody forced him; but unless he was making midnight sandwiches for the rest of the kids after a late night of drinking, he contributed almost nothing to the table.

But in Italy, of course, Oslo and Dad are not there.

The monastery, too, grows tomatoes, thick and wild in the unruly kitchen garden between the refectory and the chapel. There is a sunny patch of grass across from it, sharp with the scents of lavender and rosemary, with a curved stone bench worn glassy smooth by time, and this is one of the Professor’s favorite places to read after lunch.

Today, Denver has been forcibly conscripted by Nairobi to help her wash the plates from lunch, “since we can’t seem to get you to do anything else in the kitchen, so you might as well make yourself useful,” while Mónica goes upstairs for a nap.

Lisbon (it is easier to accept her, somehow, if he thinks of her with this name instead of the one which made her an enemy once) offers to take Cincinnati, who is an impossible distraction when loose in the kitchen. This was a hard-and-fast rule established after the last time he was caught toddling eagerly over to examine a shiny object which caught his fancy, causing Uncle Helsi to knock three chairs over to snatch him up in time, shouting, “Knife! Knife! No, Cincy! Is bad!”

There are a dozen adults and only one child, so Denver and Mónica are never short of babysitters, and rarely worry when their son is out of their sight. Wherever he is, someone is keeping an eye on him. Even Marseilles, who Denver still feels he barely knows, will take the occasional turn to agreeably rise from the table and chase him down if he goes on the run during dinner while his parents aren't looking. Even Palermo, who sometimes makes all of them uneasy, can make the child laugh.

(This must be what it is like, Denver thinks, for people who grow up with something like a family. This must be what it is like not to have the whole of your childhood orbit so tightly around one person that you unspool entirely when he goes away.)

When he finally emerges from the kitchen out into the sunshine in search of his son, he does not see anyone at first, but follows the sound of giggling over to the stone bench by the herb garden. Cincinnati is lying on his back in the grass, tomato carcass in hand, red juice all over his face and shirt and hands and hair, shrieking with mirth at every squishy bite. Lisbon holds a red-stained napkin in her lap and her raised eyebrow is rueful and amused, as though she had made an attempt at getting the situation under control before she finally threw up her hands and surrendered to the inevitable.

Even the Professor is grinning. _ “El tomate,” _ he says to the boy. “Can you say _‘tomate?’”_

“Mat,” Cincinnati repeats agreeably, then takes another bite before looking up at the sound of Denver’s footsteps. “Papa!” he exclaims, proudly holding out his treasure. “Mat! Mat!”

Denver just barely manages to choke out a smile and disappear behind the nearest tree before bursting into tears.

Lisbon, with a degree of sensitivity that surprises him, sails into the breach immediately before the small boy senses anything wrong. She scoops him up from the grass with a little toss that makes him shriek with delight, then announces, “Shall we go inside and put you in a clean shirt, little man?”

“Mat,” says Cincinnati, but does not protest.

When Denver dries his eyes on the hem of his t-shirt, swallows back the last of his sniffles, and reemerges, they are both gone.

The Professor remains, on the bench, looking up at the younger man as if he had been waiting for him, and after a moment’s hesitation, Denver shuffles over the grass toward him and sits.

He does not deliver a lecture. There is no long story about how he, too, knows what it is like to miss a father. There are no intrusive questions about the nature of the memory which has triggered such a disproportionate response. There is only a long, still moment of silence, as they sit together, taking in the glorious green-and-red tangle of the towering tomato vines, before the Professor finally says, in a quiet voice, without turning his head, “I think he would be very proud of you.”

* * *

Nairobi is on kitchen duty and has prepared a spicy seafood stew. The broth simmers for an hour while she goes for an evening walk with Tokyo; she will add the fresh scallops and chopped fish just at the end, letting it cook just until perfect doneness before serving. Denver likes this stew, she has made it before many times, but tonight he decides it needs something to go with it.

When the girls return from their walk, they are astonished to find him in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, grating sharp fresh garlic onto thick slices of Mónica’s bread, heaping platters of rose-hued _ pa amb tomàquet _on the counter all around him.

“It’s best when it’s fresh,” is all he says, without looking up from the tomato he is slicing into perfect quarters. “I took one plate out already. These two are ready, too.”

Tokyo rubs her eyes and stares at him. “Am I high,” she says, “or is Denver _cooking?”_

“If you’re high, I’m high too," says Nairobi, as she returns to the stove to check on her stew.

“It must be good stuff. I’ve never had this hallucination before.”

“Hilarious,” Denver grumbles. “Shut up and take the bread."

“Yes sir,” says Tokyo cheerfully, picking up both platters and making her way outside, where he hears her shout, “Hey! Can everybody else see Denver in the kitchen, making actual food?”

“Don’t scare him,” Palermo calls back, “or we’ll never get him to do it again!”

But Palermo, it turns out, is wrong.

Because Cincinnati, they learn, thinks Papa’s _ pa amb tomàquet - _or “mat,” as he gleefully continues to call it - is the most spectacularly delicious thing he has ever tasted in his tiny little life, and now he wants it every day.

The monastery’s tomato plants pour forth their bounty fresh each morning, faster than the monks can keep up, which means there is always a basket of ruby-red spheres warming in the sun on the kitchen windowsill. And because of Mónica, there is always bread_. _So he makes _pa amb tomàquet_ at least three or four times a week after that, sometimes for lunch, sometimes for dinner. Lisbon is the first one who begins to refer to it as _pan Cincinnati,_ and then the name sticks, and it does something to Denver - something he can't explain - to watch his son take a huge, delighted bite of something he and Mónica made together.

He is the father, now. He is the one with a son to cook for.

But he doesn't have to do it alone.

* * *

"Interestingly," says the Professor one night over dinner, as they pass the platter of _pan Cincinnati_ around the table, "the tomato was once referred to by the French as the 'love apple.' They believed it had aphrodisiac properties."

"The French think everything has aphrodisiac properties," says Bogotá.

"They aren't wrong," says Palermo breezily. "Have you ever fucked one? Nobody fucks like the French. Maybe it _is_ something in the tomatoes."

"Oh dear," says Lisbon soberly, plucking the slice of bread from Cincinnati's hand just as he is about to take a bite. "Then we probably shouldn't be serving it to children."

"Mat! Mat!" Cincinnati pleads with her. "Mine!"

Lisbon pretends to take a huge, exaggerated bite from one end of the bread, which causes him to explode into giggles, before handing it back for him to chomp happily. "I'm sorry, Professor," she says sweetly, turning back to him. "What were you saying?"

"I don't those two _need_ any more aphrodisiac properties," Tokyo mutters to Nairobi.

"Maybe we should cut them off," Nairobi agrees under her breath. "No more tomatoes. We might all get more sleep."

Lisbon overhears, and says nothing, offering the women little more than a serene smile as she plucks a thick slice of _pan Cincinnati_ from the platter, and tops it with a slice of tomato from the salad plate, then takes a huge, contented bite, staring them down with mischief in her eyes.

The Professor looks down at his napkin, as a flush sweeps over his cheeks.

* * *

It would be hard to say, that night, whether it is really fair to blame the tomatoes; but Nairobi - whose room is next door to Lisbon's - does not, in fact, get any more sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Once upon a time, I worked in an office building across the street from a dimly-lit, hole-in-the-wall Spanish bar called The Maiden, which my coworkers and I frequented probably two or three times a week. The sangria was so potent it would knock you off your bar stool, and the happy hour menu consisted of a dazzling array of tapas I still dream about today, ten years after the bar closed down. It was the first place I ever had _patatas bravas_ (fried chunks of crisp, salty potato drizzled in romesco sauce and aioli), and _albondigas_ (Spanish-style meatballs), and my favorite, _pa amb tomàquet_ (or _pan con tomate_) a deceptively simple but life-changingly delicious Catalan snack of grilled bread rubbed with olive oil, garlic, sea salt, and crushed tomato. It remains, over a decade later, the absolute best bar food of my entire life, and I have never found it on the menu of another restaurant in my city ever again. (Clearly, I need to go to Spain.) 
> 
> Anyway, this fic is at least to a small degree a love letter to all my years of sangria nights at The Maiden, as well as to the wonderful dinner scenes this show has gifted us with. _“Sobremesa”_ \- literally, “over the table” - refers to the Spanish custom of lingering at the table after a meal for wine, conversation, laughter, and (in at least a few cases) the planning of heists. I wanted to write something that was just pure family joy, during those beautiful sunny days with baby goats and bowls of fresh strawberries and singing monks, when even Palermo was kind of delightful. 
> 
> I hope you all enjoy.


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